I got this email last week from Corby Waste, whose Cordwainer Smith art is on the website.
They say sometimes the “truth is stranger than fiction”. Not for us Cordwainer Smith fans – we’ve heard it all before!!!
Rat-brain robot aids memory study – BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7559150.stmRat brain flies jet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/07/rat_brain_flies_jet/Can a spaceship be far behind?
I believe at least some credit for these breakthroughs belongs to CS. Not quite “laminated” rat brain neurons but still eerily similar.
He had also sent this to CS researcher/biographer Alan Elms, who replied:
As for whether the rat brain in the first experiment was laminated, this description of the process sounds close enough for non-fiction: “The blob of nerves forming the brain of the robot was taken from the neural cortex in a rat foetus and then treated to dissolve the connections between individual neurons.” One wonders — I wonder — whether these researchers were originally inspired by reading “Think Blue, Count Two.”
Alan later sent me this link, with the comment, “Just to clarify the historical record on laminated rat brains a little…” http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/08/15/rat_brain/index.html
Thanks, Corby and Alan, for providing such a great start to the “It’s Happening Now” section of the blog.
I was just a boy when “The Game of Rat and Dragon”, CS’s first story in Galaxy, came out. Enjoyed reading this new, to me then, writing talent.
That was the very first thing I thought of when I read those news reports last week. I’m very glad to see this blog and learn I’m not the only one who made the connection!
RAB, I’m glad to be providing a place where we can share these connections. When I first put the site up in 2000 for the couple of years that I ran an ezine, people sent me a lot of this kind of thing. I didn’t add most of them to this makeover of the site, because the news reports they linked to were mostly gone.
But there IS a trend!